Between the World and Me (One World Essentials)

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God.

Our parents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the scourge.

The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers.

There was no nobility in falling, in being bound, in living oppressed, and there was no inherent meaning in black blood.

My great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.

we are the dark spectrum on parade.

why there were so many churches and so few supermarkets.

that the bodies of women are set out for pillage in ways I could never truly know.

you were the God I’d never had.

Oh my god im crying

They were people turned to fuel for the American machine.

The birth of a better world is not ultimately up to you, though I know, each day, there are grown men and women who tell you otherwise.

You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold.

Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered.

viewed the destruction of the black body as incidental to the preservation of order.

The galaxy belonged to them, and as terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs.

Holy shit

I could have you arrested!” Which is to say: “I could take your body.”

And godless though I am, the fact of being human, the fact of possessing the gift of study, and thus being remarkable among all the matter floating through the cosmos, still awes me.

The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream. They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs.

They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.